JioHotstar’s International Debut Skips Sports, Bets on 160,000 Hours Of Indian Entertainment

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• JioHotstar replaces Hotstar in the UK, Canada, and Singapore starting September 2, 2026.
• The service launches with 160,000+ hours of content but excludes all sports programming.
• Monthly plans are discontinued; pricing shifts to quarterly and annual tiers in all three markets.

Reliance’s home-grown streaming giant is stepping outside its native market for the first time. Starting September 2, 2026, JioHotstar will replace the Hotstar app in the United Kingdom, Canada, and Singapore.

This doesn’t come as a surprise, though. We saw this development coming ever since Reliance Industries and The Walt Disney Company finalized their $8.5 billion joint venture in November 2024. 

Pricing & Availability

As part of its global expansion, JioHotstar has announced quarterly and annual subscription plans. Interestingly, the streaming giant has skipped monthly subscription plans altogether, which are quite popular in India. 

So, what happens to existing global subscribers on monthly plans? They get a grace period to shift to the quarterly or the annual plans. They can keep their current subscription active, but they’ll have to choose between the two available plans on the renewal date. 

For context, Indian subscribers still pay as little as ₹79 a month.

What You Actually Get For That Money

Here’s the catch: no cricket. No IPL, no Indian national team matches, and that seems fine, but the plans don’t include any Premier League or Wimbledon coverage either. All the sports content that hooks a chunk of JioHotstar’s 500 million-plus Indian subscribers isn’t part of this international plan. For our international readers, you can blame the existing regional broadcast deals. 

What you do get, as per the platform, is over 160,000 hours of entertainment (at launch), with 30,000 hours worth of content added every year. Think Bigg Boss running across six languages with live voting, Hotstar Originals like Asur and Criminal Justice, and movies including Dhurandhar and 12th Fail.

From what it looks like, the streaming giant isn’t targeting a foreign audience per se, but an Indian audience settled abroad who wants seamless access without workarounds and can afford the pricing. 

I think withholding sports is an interesting choice here. Cricket rights are quite expensive (and so is the advertising fee that streaming giants charge for them), market-specific, and tangled in exclusivity deals. If JioStar had insisted on including them from day one, that could have delayed the rollout.

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